Faculty Introduction for “From Self to ‘Gendered Self’: Women’s Tragedy Under Patriarchy as Depicted in Raise the Red Lantern”

Ella Zhang’s “From Self to ‘Gendered Self’: Women’s Tragedy Under Patriarchy as Depicted in Raise the Red Lantern” astonished me when I encountered it sandwiched in my pile of PoH Tales of Gender and Power final research essays. True, Judith Butler’s seminal essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” had been our first crucial text of the semester, so we had often returned to reflect on it as we moved through our kaleidoscope of gender-inflected course texts. Certainly, to honorably consider Butler’s pathbreaking theory of gender constitution is a worthwhile intellectual activity on its own. Yet to then, as Ella does, wield Butler’s complex theoretical lens to critique a literary masterpiece, moves her essay to a notably higher level of inquiry and discourse.

Actually, Ella’s ambitious, well-researched essay accomplishes even more: it bravely harnesses Butler’s late twentieth-century West-rooted theory to venture into a cross-cultural and transhistorical analysis. To do so, she turns to Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, a film set in Republican China and populated by characters mired in China’s millennia-old patriarchal tradition. Ella’s object—and the laudable success of her essay—is not merely to make sense of the tragic, gender-determined conse-quences of heroine Songlian’s progressive psychological disintegration in her coerced concubinage. It is to deploy Butler’s theory to identify and expose the socially and culturally codified gender politics that corroded the lives of Republican-era Chinese women who, like Songlian, dared reach past China’s ancient patriarchal tradition hoping for a full and unconstrained expression of self.

Songlian’s efforts may have failed, with heartbreaking consequences. But Ella’s mission of re-demption—to establish Songlian’s right to the conscious constitution of her most authentic self, gendered as it must be—richly succeeds.

Read “From Self to ‘Gendered Self’: Women’s Tragedy Under Patriarchy as Depicted in Raise the Red Lantern“.

Amy R. Goldman, Lecturer in the Writing Program